Newspapers go through three basic stages before reaching the consumer. These stages are commonly referred to as the press room, mailroom and circulation stages. During the press room or printing stage, the newspapers are printed, cut and folded into complete papers at very high speeds. Typically the papers are presented at the end of the press stage as a high speed stream of partially overlapped newspapers.
Currently, at the mailroom stage, newspapers are arranged in stacks and bundled for distribution to various locations. The stacking and bundling operation is an expensive procedure that employs extensive complex equipment. These bundles may be stacked in either fixed quantities or in predetermined quantities directed to a definite ultimate distribution point. The made to order sized bundle complicates the stacking and bundling operation as well as the circulation stage because it requires the bundles to be individually tracked.
Complete bundles are delivered from the mailroom facility into the circulation stage. Typically, the bundles are conveyed directly to the trucks where the bundles are manually removed from the conveyor and loaded into the cargo space on the truck. This manual loading operation is slow and tedious and, since it is highly labor intensive, significantly increases the operating costs for the circulation stage.
In order to address this industry problem, systems were developed to automate the circulation stage. Such systems comprise loading carts and automatic cart loaders, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,181,820 and 5,437,537, that were used to receive bundles from the mailroom and place bundles into the carts. The carts were then manually wheeled into the cargo space of the truck. The carts were dimensioned so as to make the most economic use of the total cargo space volume. When the trucks reached their destination the carts were removed from the cargo space and unloaded.
Although these automated systems helped make better use of the cargo space and reduced some of the manual operations, these systems still involved the manual loading and unloading of the cargo space and did nothing to address the stacking and bundling operation in the mailroom stage. Furthermore, the newspapers were still in stacked bundles at the point of ultimate distribution to the retailers, door-to-door deliverers, and honor boxes. This meant that either individual bundles of predetermined quantities of newspapers needed to be prepared, individually tracked through the entire circulation stage, and delivered to this ultimate distribution point or the bundles needed to be broken apart and separated at the distribution point in order to deliver the required amount of newspapers. It is clear that the prior art newspaper systems involved numerous semi-automated and manual steps which required costly equipment, labor and time to receive the newspapers from the print room stage to the ultimate distribution point.
Since the uninterrupted operation of the printing press is of premium importance, there may be additional equipment, for instance, between the pressroom and mailroom stage to provide a buffer between the two. For example, if the stacking and bundling equipment were to be inoperable, the printing press could continue to operate provided the stream of papers could be diverted to a buffer. Heretofore, the buffer system included a helical ramp with vertical shaft. The succession of newspapers was caused to run up the ramp. This was problematic because the newspapers would slide and turn resulting in ink becoming smudged and papers becoming creased.
Another buffer system involved a drum where the papers were rolled onto the drum with the aid of a strap. This system also had a number of drawbacks and limitations in that it only provided minimal storage capacity and required large portions of valuable floor space in order to operate. U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,618 discusses a system that required significantly less floor space than the operating space required for the drum. This system involved a vertically rising shelf unit that straddled the conveyed stream of newspapers and engaged the outside edges of the newspapers. This shelf unit lifted the papers vertically and held them in storage. The unit required an upstream device to divide the succession of newspapers into longitudinal sections so that stacks of newspapers could be positioned on each shelf.
The cigarette industry uses a vertically stacked horizontal conveyor to temporarily store cigarettes. This system, described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,201,507, is designed for conveying and temporarily storing rod-like articles (cigarettes or cigarette filter rods). This system handles multiple layers of free flowing cigarettes bounded at the leading end by a closure device and on the top and bottom by conveyors. The leading end closure device is carefully designed to pass through the unit's zig-zag conveyor path. The movement of the cigarettes is controlled by the movement of the end closure device as the cigarettes are not discretely held within the unit. As the end closure device moves forward in the storage unit, it creates an ever enlarging cavity defined by the upper and lower conveyors and the backface of the closure device. The layered stream of free-flowing cigarettes is continuously pumped into this progressive cavity to fill the storage device.
Once the cavity is filled, the input opening of the storage device is closed off to hold the back face of the free-flowing cigarettes in the storage unit. In order to maintain a continuous full flow of cigarettes, the system is equipped with an elevator that provides a vertical cavity for allowing the formation of a full path of cigarettes.
The movement of the free-flowing cigarettes in this system is analogous to water being pumped through a pipe. The cigarettes are not held fixed with respect to each other or the conveyor surface. Therefore, the mass of cigarettes moves freely within the zig-zag path of the system. The system is incapable of individually dispensing cigarettes as it only controls the movement of the closure device nor is it capable of maintaining the relative position of the cigarettes.
It is therefore an aspect of the present invention to provide an automated system for receiving newspapers at a speed equal to or exceeding the industry printing standards, storing the papers in a fixed relationship which minimizes damage to the newspapers such as print smudging and paper creasing, and dispensing the newspapers on demand in either discrete quantities or as a continuous stream.
It is another aspect of the present invention to provide a system for receiving, storing, and delivering newspapers from a printing press to the ultimate distribution point without requiring the papers to be bundled.
It is still a further aspect of the present invention to provide a system for automatically receiving newspapers from a printing press, storing them in a fixed relationship and automatically dispensing individual quantities of newspapers at a remote location.
It is still a further aspect of the present invention to provide an automated system for receiving, holding and re-introducing a continuous stream of newspapers.
It is yet another aspect of the present invention to provide an automated high volume per unit area newspaper storage unit that firmly holds each newspaper and is capable of selectively dispensing newspapers.
It is yet another aspect of the present invention to provide an automated continuous conveyor system comprising a series of closely arranged vertically stacked conveyors that receive, hold, and dispense newspapers.